You've reached your free article limit.

Become a Soccer America Pro member today to get complete website access to all articles and all discussions and receive all of Soccer America’s newsletters for just $2.91 for three months.

This premium subscription level includes Soccer America Daily, Soccer on TV, Soccer Talk, the Game Report and Soccer America Confidential. Soccer America Pro members may read, share and comment on all articles from these paid premium newsletters.

Your email address has been verified. Enjoy your free articles.

Commentary

Road-trip games for a fun journey

Whether your child plays select or recreation soccer, chances are good that in the next six months you’ll travel at least 300 miles to a tournament. It’s
not only becoming more and more acceptable for any team to travel, but it has also become expected.

Even though a decade of these trips set back our retirement 20 years, we always looked
forward to them. They were opportunities to explore different parts of our country and spend quality time as a family. However, traveling proficiently required a learning curve.

Being cooped
up in a car for hundreds of miles across empty prairie lands didn’t always result in loving togetherness. Instead, the trip sometimes quickly devolved into petty arguments, mega sulking spells,
and lots of “Are we there yet?” voiced in strained pleading tones, especially on the ride home after a less than triumphant contest.

EXPLORE THE
LANDSCAPE. It became important to not only find ways of passing the time but also ways in which everyone could participate. We hated relying on DVDs because they just isolated everyone and
stole their attention away from the landscape we were discovering.

Following are some of the delights we bonded over, plus a few new ones I wish we’d had on those trips. Several of these
can also be used on planes and even in the hotel room. On rainout days we were able to entertain an entire team in the lobby of our hotel. For a minimal investment, we managed to gather a wide variety
of fun.

You all know the standard road games like the alphabet game, auto bingo, and license plate hunt, which work, but not always for all age categories. I still recommend them because they
require little expense (auto bingo cards run $1 to $2 each) or no expense at all. The problem comes when you enter the truly “open road” sections of a trip where signs, animals, plants and
structures are at a minimum. Hunting for the letter Q in no man’s land usually leads to giving up at worst and restlessness at best. Plus those games don’t work on an airplane. You should
keep them in the road trip repertoire but consider adding a few upgrades.

For example, University Games offers a twist on travel bingo for $7 called Travel Scavenger Hunt, which consists
of a pack of cards. Individuals or teams work to discover all the items on the card. The game works on the road or even in an airport because there are special “hear it,” “feel
it,” and “smell it” categories. The game is rated for ages 7 and above, so it should work for the entire family. We teamed up older with younger players and even had 3-year-olds
shouting out discoveries.

Loaded Questions On the Go by All Things
Equal sells for about $10. This is a great game for the road, the hotel room and on the plane. Again, it’s a pack of cards with four small pencils where one person chooses a question off the
card (“What’s your best ability?”) and everyone else writes their answer on a sheet. Someone reads the answers and the person who chose the question has to guess who gave each
answer. You can keep score, but we never did. It was more fun to see what answers came up, who was attributed to that answer, and why. Answers and reactions usually result in some good laughs. The
driver can participate but needs “shotgun” to fill out the answer.

My favorite road trip go-to is Mad Libs. Each pad is around
$4 and has dozens of games. Besides teaching some basic English grammar, the fill-in games provide some major laughs. You can rotate who controls the pad and fills in the answers. We reserved nouns
and verbs for the youngest kids as those are easier to think of.

ART OPTIONS. There are also several options for quiet singular play. The newest option is
adult coloring books. These provide far more complex drawings to color in than regular coloring books. You can keep several levels on hand plus a box or two of colored pencils to keep everyone
entertained. I shy away from crayons because they tend to melt in the heat of a car parked long hours in a tournament lot. Crayola sells a box of 50 sharpened colored pencils for $13.50. A small
pencil sharpener will set you back less than $2.

Some great options for kids are Harry Potter coloring books by Hot Topic for $16.50 and
Creative Haven Country Scenes for $4. Dover Press makes smaller coloring books for kids that are the size of a small paperback and
sell for $2. Pepin Press has books of tile cards that are 5x6 inches, printed on thick cardboard, and come in a variety of tile designs (Barcelona,
Art Noveau, Dutch), which sell for $13.

If coloring isn’t their thing, there’s a fun puzzle by Smethport called Magnetic Doodle Balls for $5.
It’s a covered grid board around which kids move and drop iron balls using a magnetic wand. They can make any number of designs and pictures. The board is the size of a regular magazine, but be
sure to keep track of the wand which has a storage spot on the board.

University Games created Spot the Difference Travel
Game where cards come in a tin. The cards have two pictures and players need to find the differences between the two. Kids can play alone or you can time players to see how many differences they
find in 60 seconds. Every smartphone has a stop watch, which is what we used rather than dealing with egg timers.

On the route or once you reach your destination, there are three terrific
options that help kids learn something about where they are visiting. National Geographic Kids has the Ultimate U.S. Road Trip
Atlas for about $6. The book provides interesting facts about the areas through which you travel, unusual roadside attractions, historical markers, and viewpoints along with maps and some
games.

If you have AAA membership, there’s still that wonderful Triptik that they created with paper inserts and now create online. There’s a AAA mobile app that allows you to
place your Triptik on a smartphone or a tablet. Each Triptik highlights restaurants, charging stations for electric cars, gas stations, various attractions and historical sites, and side trips along
your route. Kids can follow along, pick a place to eat lunch, find a spot to take a break, and figure out how much longer the trip will take.

Once you get to your destination, Idea Box Kids
has a wonderful tool for making everyone’s trip fun. Called the Adventure Box, it contains dozens
of Family Fun Day coins that kids can choose from the box. Each coin details an adventure to find in your new town such as A Cupcake or Donut Shop or A Zoo. It sells for $18. They also offer an Airplane Box for
kids with coins that suggest things like How Long Can You Balance a Snack on Your Nose and Go on a Little Walk, which sells for $9.

MAKE YOUR OWN GAMES.
You can also create some games fairly easily. I always print off alphabetical lists of states that the kids can cross off as they find license plates. Tournament parking lots can be a gold mine for
completing the list keeping all the non-soccer family members busy during warm-ups. A small bag of coins can create a fun guessing game. Kids take out some coins and hide them in their hands. Everyone
guesses how much total money is being held. Closest guesser gets to hide the next coins. We also play the distance game when you can see far enough ahead to the horizon. Everyone guesses how far it is
to some landmark (a rock, a tree, a structure, or the crest of a hill), then watch the odometer, and the person closest without going over (a geographical Price is Right, I guess) wins and picks the
next landmark.

We also played the car game. Each person is assigned either a car model or color (easiest for younger players) and counts how many of them they find in either a certain distance
or time. We kept white and black out of the color choices as those colors are plentiful.

Once you collect some games, you’ll need a place to store them while traveling. I’m a big
fan of locking plastic bags. They come in a variety of sizes and keep pieces together. Some are already self-contained. Games on the Go from Continuum is a collection
of 50 games in a license plate replica package of flip cards that are held together with a clip that you can attach to a purse, soccer bag, or cooler. Everything is kept together easily and
conveniently.

For the other games you can use Etna’s Car Seat
Organizer a cube that has 10 outside mesh pockets, a cooler, and a hard top for playing or drawing on. The entire thing is portable with straps for carrying and costs $20. There are also fold down
tables for seat backs from Car Gadgets that have a flat table surface and three pockets for storage. We wore ours out, and they proved helpful for everything from eating on the fly, to setting up DVD
players, to being a drawing surface, to being a lap top/tablet table. These are only $11.50 each, so it’s not unreasonable to buy two of them or even more for that minivan.

Activities
for road trips should be compact, have few small parts that can get lost, and be fun for all ages in the car. These few suggestions fit those parameters, but are certainly only some of the options
available. All of these can be purchased through the manufacturers, but Amazon also carries all of them at often reduced prices and with free shipping if you are a Prime member. Most are also
available through Wal-Mart and Barnes and Noble. You can do a search to see where you might find them cheaper.

We kept our games in a half file box that had cut-outs for handles and a lid
found in any office supply store. The boys decorated it with dozens of soccer logos and stickers and that box saw us through over a decade of travel. It was easy to transfer it into other vehicles if
the boys were traveling with friends and from the car into the hotel room. Players would ask if the boys had the box because they knew it contained some fun time wasters.

We put two decks of
playing cards in the box and a set of die just to be prepared for some downtime. Eventually we had to create a second box as the boys began playing in separate parts of the country, but the overall
cost was not that high to duplicate the best games and worth the expense as the games were well-used. As exciting as soccer can be, there will always be long lapses of boring waits and miles of
traveling in order to participate. Finding some great distractions can fill the empty stretches with fun.

(Susan Boydblogs every
Monday at USYouthSoccer.org, where this article first appeared. A dedicated mother and wife, Susan offers a truly unique perspective into
the world of a soccer parent.)

US Soccer should ban away tournaments and maybe all tournaments for players under 14 years. And those over 14 should have to show good cause to travel. Tournaments exist because they are a social occasion for the parents and a source of revenue for those putting them on. If money is going to be spent, spend it on educating the coaches at the younger age groups. But that really flies in the face of the American Soccer Culture. Is this how players are produced? Now we have articles on how to prepare yourself for the trip, or at least reminiscing about it. Simply amazing. Problem is that this isn't a unique perspective. It is a normal perspective. I guess I will anticipate the backlash.

Estimated number of miles traveled for Soccer: Well I drove 200 - 240 miles round trip four or five times a week just for Chicago Magic – so I drove about 52,000 miles a year for practice and games alone. But I'm insane. That car, the Toyota Sienna, is still running with 215,000 miles and counting. It will forever be the "soccer" car. Every time I vacuum it out I find some small bit of soccer gear!

Estimated number of dollars spent on Soccer: Probably around $10,000 a year per kid not counting the gas. So it's important to know that the sport is their passion. Otherwise that money would be better invested in a college fund!

"Whether your child plays select or recreation soccer, chances are good that in the next six months you’ll travel at least 300 miles to a tournament. It’s not only becoming more and more acceptable for any team to travel, but it has also become expected."

And people wonder why kids quit playing soccer in droves when they become teens?